🦅 For Six Months He Got Nothing. Today He Has 217,000 Followers.

For Six Months He Got Nothing. Today He Has 217,000 Followers.

Charlie Hills posted on LinkedIn every day for six months, and almost nobody saw it. Most creators quit between months one and four, convinced that particular platform doesn't work for them or the algorithm is the issue.

Charlie didn't. Here’s what he did instead.

1) Motivation Dies in Month Three. Systems Don't.

The invisible phase is where most creators bury their accounts. Three months of posting with nothing to show for it is enough to wear down anyone's willpower.

The posts get shorter. The gaps get longer. Then one Monday, you just don't post. A week later you tell yourself you're taking a break.

Charlie survived it by making "should I post today?" impossible to ask. He ran three things:

• A content calendar

• A daily routine

• A framework that told him exactly what to write and when

No mood-dependent rituals. No waiting for inspiration. Just the same sequence on every weekday, whether yesterday's post got 2 likes or 200.

"If you post consistently, you are already ahead of 99% of users," he wrote later.

The math is brutal. Almost everyone starts. Almost everyone stops. The bar to be in the top 1% isn't talent. It's showing up on the days you don't want to.

The point of a system isn't to make the work feel good. It's to make the work keep happening when you're not in the mood.

What to do:

Steal Charlie's system and the exact prompts he uses to build his content calendar: charliehills.substack.com

2) Stop Posting and Ghosting

With the system running on autopilot, Charlie had the mental space to see what he was doing wrong.

For months he'd treated LinkedIn like a broadcast channel. He wrote the post, hit publish, and left. The reach stayed flat.

The fix wasn't better content. It was a mindset shift. He realized LinkedIn is a social platform, not a newsletter. So he started commenting on other creators' posts before his own went live. He celebrated people in public. He DMed creators outside his niche. He reframed engagement as the job, not the afterthought.

Same content. Same frequency. Completely different numbers. From December to May, he'd been growing slowly. From June to September, he started growing fast.

Now he runs a timed daily circuit.

• 15 minutes commenting on other people's posts.

• 15 minutes publishing his own and pinning a comment.

• 15 minutes replying to every comment on the new post.

• 10 minutes of DM outreach to people who engaged.

• 5 minutes of personalized connection requests.

He credits that hour more than the content itself.

What to do:

1. Build an engagement list of about 50–100 accounts: 50% peers your size (reciprocal), 30% ideal customers, 20% bigger creators

2. Run Charlie's 60-minute daily circuit: 15 min commenting on your list, 15 min publishing and pinning a comment, 15 min replying to every comment on the new post, 10 min DMing people who engaged, 5 min of personalized connection requests

3. Use Hypefury to schedule your posts in advance so you save extra time each week

3) Growth Isn't Linear. It's Quiet, Then Loud.

Charlie's invisible six months aren't unusual. They're the norm for creators who eventually make it. He kept running the circuit. Two years later, 217,000 followers.

Packy McCormick wrote Not Boring for over a year without crossing 1,000 subscribers. The year after he did, he hit 50,000.

The shape is consistent. A long flat stretch where the work doesn't look like it's working. Then the curve bends, and the earlier struggle looks almost invisible in retrospect.

The growth you can't see yet is being built by the consistency you're putting in right now.

The creators who compound are the ones who stay around long enough to let it happen.

Anthropic Labs launches with Claude Design, a conversational visual tool

Anthropic spun up a new experimental division called Anthropic Labs, and its first release is Claude Design, a tool that generates prototypes, slides, and marketing assets through conversation with Claude Opus 4.7. It targets founders, PMs, marketers, and anyone without design expertise, and it applies existing brand systems automatically to stay visually consistent.

Read more

LinkedIn's new AI algorithm quietly killed organic reach on company pages

LinkedIn replaced its fragmented ranking system with 360Brew, a 150-billion-parameter model that reads content semantically instead of counting likes. Organic reach on corporate pages collapsed, while expert-driven posts from individual employees get amplified. Only 3% of employees typically share company content, but those shares already drive roughly 30% of brand engagement. The play for brands: shift budget from company pages to employee advocacy, clarify positioning so multiple voices carry the same message, and treat personal profiles as raw material for AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity (LinkedIn is now the second most-cited domain in AI search).

Read more

AI tools let PMs build to learn without engineers

As teams move from the project model to the product model, many product managers lose the role that used to justify their seat (feature delivery and project coordination). Marty Cagan's distinction: building to learn (throwaway prototypes that validate an idea) and building to earn (production software that has to ship and scale) are two different activities with different standards. Tools like Claude Code and Cursor now let PMs handle the build-to-learn half themselves, prototyping directly in code to test assumptions before engineers invest in the earn phase. The practical shift for PMs is moving from writing specs to validating solutions hands-on.

Read more

That’s it for now, everyone! We’ll meet again next week to discuss more of this!

Don’t forget to try Hypefury (for free) if you haven’t yet.

Feel free to reply to this email. It goes directly to me.

Cheers,

Yannick Veys
Co-founder and CMO of Hypefury